The Most Beautiful Song Ever

By N.S. Palmer, Ph.D.

My computer is currently playing what I consider the most beautiful song ever.

It’s my all-time favorite: “Die Kraft Der Liebe” (The Power of Love) sung in German by Dutch songstress Dana Winner. It’s one of the songs on Ms. Winner’s CD, “Wo Ist Das Gefuhl?” (Where Is The Feeling?).

The song has the melody of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A (K.622), second movement: the kind of hopelessly retro, breathtakingly poignant music that American pop singers would never touch and American music companies would never publish.

Winner has a voice like an angel: clear, strong, and perfectly on key. Her German is clear and easy to understand, perhaps because she is Dutch and trying harder than a native German speaker to pronounce everything precisely.

Oddly, I couldn’t find the lyrics on the Web. One Web site said that it had to take down the lyrics “for copyright reasons.” That’s pretty interesting: Apparently, you can’t even tell anyone what the lyrics are without getting threatened by some corporation’s legal department. I’ll see if I can get away with telling you a little bit of them:

Jetzt und hier, steh ich vor deiner Tur (Now and here, I stand before your door)
Lang hab ich davon getraumt (Long have I dreamed of it)
So stark, zu sein wie Heut, (To be as strong as I feel on this day)
Nur durch die Kraft der Liebe ganz allein. (Only through the power of love, all by itself.)

Just from the lyrics, you can’t imagine the soulful yearning of the song, the haunting beauty of Mozart’s melody, or the delight of hearing Ms. Winner’s voice. I wish you could. But if you have any love for music — and by “music,” I mean actual music, not the kind of “floor show with soundtrack” that passes for music these days — you might try downloading the song from some legal outlet.

I’m not endorsing iTunes, but here’s the link to its page for the song if you want to click the page’s Preview button and listen to a sample.

Copyright 2009 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.